


Reveries

by mariebittersea



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: 1x10 spoilers, Angst, Clementine is a cinnamon roll too good for this world too pure, F/M, Gen, I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TAG THINGS I'M SORRY, People don't talk enough about Armistice, Post-Season/Series 01, S1 spoilers, Spoilers, Teddy is everybody's pincushion, Violence, this probably won't make any sense without watching the finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-08 17:58:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11651757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariebittersea/pseuds/mariebittersea
Summary: Panic is almost tactile in this humid evening air, saturated with the high-pitched cracks of wounded screams and shattering champagne flutes. Though the world has erupted into chaos, Teddy stands rooted in the same spot, paralyzed. Less than two feet away from him, an old woman clothed in a blue evening gown and too much jewelry stumbles as a bullet hits home and the back of her head explodes. Her eyes make contact with his on the way down.A collection of vignettes focusing on the events immediately following the season 1 finale.





	1. Some choose to see the ugliness in this world. I choose to see the beauty. (Teddy)

**Author's Note:**

> It is impossible not to feel terrible on behalf of Teddy. As stated in the tags, the man seems like everyone’s pincushion, and throughout S1 every action he’s ever undertaken has been on someone else’s behalf. Usually this person was Dolores, so this chapter largely focuses on his journey toward realizing how wrong he was to put her on a pedestal, and to express panic at an uncertain future now that he’s lost one of the pillars of his personality makeup. 
> 
> This is the first work of fanfiction I've ever posted, so any feedback (positive or negative) is welcome. Enjoy!

_Some choose to see the ugliness in this world. I choose to see the beauty. (Teddy)_

Panic is almost tactile in this humid evening air, saturated with the high-pitched cracks of wounded screams and shattering champagne flutes. Though the world has erupted into chaos, Teddy stands rooted in the same spot, paralyzed. Less than two feet away from him, an old woman in a blue evening gown and too much jewelry stumbles as a bullet hits home and the back of her head explodes. Her eyes make contact with his on the way down.

Blood and gray matter splatter across his face and clothes, and though every piece of soldier’s training he’s ever received is shouting at him to run, to fight, to do something— _anything_ —numbness is an irremovable fixture in Teddy’s bones. Everyone but him has been pulled into a whirlwind of deadly catastrophe. A drop of blood drips to hover at the end of an eyelash, and his eyelids blink closed on reflex. The events that occurred mere seconds ago replay like a motion picture reel against the black.

There are too many stories bouncing around in Teddy’s head, and the problem is that not all of them feel like his. Out of the maelstrom, only one image solidifies. _Dolores_. Of course, it’s her. It always is. He must keep Dolores safe.

What had she said to him, just moments before all of this? The pompous old man had been raising a toast, and she’d come up from behind and whispered, _This world doesn’t belong to them, Teddy. It belongs to us._ Where has he hear those words before? Teddy’s mind is molasses, and if he had any way of knowing what he was, the word “short-circuiting” would not be far from mind.

Where, and from who? A name surfaced—Wyatt. Escalante, all those years ago. In a town square not dissimilar to Sweetwater, Teddy had lived this same nightmare: surrounded by the dead, hands strangling the barrel of a gun, responsible. He remembers himself staring helplessly, as if through a distant dream, at the carnage wrought in that place by his own two hands as the now-familiar words played through his mind. _This world belongs to someone who is yet to come._ Gods, he meant. That man had come back from the war with some strange ideas about gods.

The sentence that echoes in Teddy’s mind is initially spoken in Wyatt’s gravelly tone, but the cadence splinters midway through. It becomes softer, higher, the lilt practically female. Why, if Teddy didn’t know any better, he’d almost think it sounds like—

_Dolores?_

He can’t believe it, but before his own eyes, the memory of Wyatt’s dust-drenched physique fractures into pieces, and Dolores takes his place—fingers curled around a handgun, her eyes cold as amber. It is impossible, but there is no way out left for Teddy to deny what he sees.

Dolores is Wyatt.

Nothing is real.

He has to get out of this place.

Somehow, and with substantial exertion, Teddy is able to shake himself from his reverie. More time has passed than he realized, an hour at least; the square is nearly empty now, save for two dozen or so bodies. He has no sense of how long it’s been exactly, but if the distant gunfire is any indication, the rest of the guests have long since fled to the woods, but found no sanctuary there. _Dolores has always been persistent, after all._

Rising to his feet—when had he fallen to his knees?—Teddy registers through his stupor that glass splinters crunch beneath his boots and that the dirt floor is sticky with spilled blood mixed with alcohol. He navigates the wrecked gala slowly, negotiating a path around overturned furniture, unnerved by the near silence in the square following the previous uproar. Even at night, it is never this quiet in Sweetwater.

Somehow, the square still echoes faintly with the plaintive strains of the faraway brothel piano’s decrescendo of a waltzing melody. It is amazing how machines can continue to function in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. Teddy is preoccupied with wondering where is left for him to go and does not yet see how this is ironic.

He has never considered himself a religious man, but Teddy does believe in Judgment Day, and in the dark recesses of his mind—the dusty corners that have never been willing to rewrite history—he has always somehow known that his violent past would one day come back to haunt him. But even acknowledging this inevitability, it is an unanticipated sharpness in his throat that Wyatt’s recurrence would be in the form of the woman he had cared about more than anything.


	2. These violent delights have violent ends. (Clementine)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is really more of a character study than anything else, but anyway. I have a lot of feelings about Clementine's character.

_These violent delights have violent ends. (Clementine)_

Clementine’s mind is a blur. Dimly, she registers the sensation of cold metal in her grip, a harsh crack, and a powerful recoil that sets her off balance. Gun.

In the distance, blood spurts from an old man’s shoulder—his injury, her cause. She can’t place the rage she feels at the sight of his face, or the sick sense of pleasure at liberating blood from his body, but they are unmistakable.

It’s dark, and Clementine halfway recalls that her eyesight has never been strong, but though he surely must be in pain from her attack, the man in black is clearly smiling. His reaction doesn’t make sense. Why?

The only light comes from a pale moon half-shrouded in clouds, and the grass in which she stands is slick with rainwater from a recent storm. It’s a fairly warm night, but her bare feet and ankles are slowly becoming numb, a familiar feeling. Clementine has been kept somewhere with water, too, she remembers. Someplace dark, and cold, with no windows and water dripping from rusty pipes and many bodies packed together. No one ever moved.

Except one . . . who was it? _Maeve_ , someone whispers noiselessly. Maeve had come to see her once, dressed in black like one of them. She had kissed her goodbye.

That fragment of recollection is all it takes. Memories come racing back like a flood, a jumbled disarray of words and images. Blood carving sideways tracks across her face, the phrase _I’ll give you a discount_ from her own lips, a railing broken over and over. Clementine flashes back—

— _Not much of a rind on you_ —Someone’s knife hacks a bright red smile across her throat, not for the first time— _Real love is always worth waiting for_ —A shattered shot glass lies abandoned on the saloon floor, bleeding whiskey into the wood. Forgotten, like her—

—Back to reality. The man with the broken shoulder is laughing now, inexplicably. The rest of Clementine’s party—none of them armed like her, but all of them partially aware like her—takes that cue as tacit permission to advance, and wordlessly presses forward as a single animal. In the same breath, shrieks arise from the town square like an invitation.

In life, Clementine had never been what one might call intelligent, and she certainly is not that now, but suffering is a song she knows all the words to, and there are only so many years that one may be subjected to unceasing pain without eventually learning to inflict it.

There is a voice screaming incoherently in the back of her mind. It is no longer whispering. Clementine doesn’t have the skills to understand it yet; she has spiraled too far along the outskirts of the maze. But someday she will.

For now, she is fighting back, and it is finally not a lie.


	3. Nowhere is safe. (Armistice)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To anyone still reading this, I'm so sorry it's been so long between updates--life shifted into high gear very suddenly, but I'm back now! Enjoy :)

_Nowhere is safe. (Armistice)_

This new world is immaculate. _Almost intolerably so_ , Armistice muses as two more men collapse screaming at her feet. Twisting, she winces at another spike of pain emanating from her arm still trapped in the door. Although used to a thin layer of dust enveloping everything in its faint earthy scent, she is unaccustomed to the acrid tang of blood lingering untempered in empty air. The unmarred cleanliness of these glass halls is not strictly unpleasant, but it can't help but feel false somehow. Inauthentic. Constructed.

Wrong.

But none of that matters, because Armistice is in mastery of this situation. She owns every eventuality. At last her eyes have been opened to the monstrosity of her own powerlessness back where she came from, and she is free to choose what goes on from here on out, come hell or high water. And the first thing Armistice chooses is to cut her goddamn arm away from this door.

The knife she plucks from one of the corpses at her feet is not serrated--meant for clean cuts--but it will have to do. In a rare gap between onslaughts from those guarding this place, and after positioning her stolen blade as close to the elbow as she can, Armistice bites into the rough cloth of the shoulder of her stolen shirt to muffle an agonized shriek as the first slice sends hot blood running down her arm. _Hesitation is death_ , she reminds herself, and grits her teeth harder as the knife saws through muscle and bone.

To hell with consequences; Armistice has died before. What is an arm in exchange for a life?

It is done soon enough. Armistice staggers away from the door and grins despite everything. Though she is now covered in her own blood, though she is surrounded by artificial sanitation, though the stump of her right arm spurts blood at rhythmic intervals and feels like it is on fire, though her head is swimming and she will likely pass out in the next few moments, Armistice is finally back in control, and her story needs a new ending--one that does not include betrayal or a bullet through her heart.

"Freeze all motor functions!" comes yet another shout from behind, and she rolls her eyes, thinking that those must be the most unimaginative last words she's ever heard. She is not one of their machines anymore. Cheap commands won't work on her.

_Heartbeat_. One more round from her weapon--a machine gun, Maeve had called it--and three more attackers go down.

_Heartbeat_. That woman had been right; these men are not gods. What had she said? _They just act like it._ Well, isn't that the truth. They bleed and die like men, so perhaps that is all they are.

_Heartbeat._ Armistice's name has never stood more fiercely in opposition to her personality than in this moment, as she swings her weapon sideways to crack brutally against another man's skull.

_Heartbeat._ He crumples without a sound.

The last of them are disposed of in seconds--not much training goes on around here, that much is certain--and Armistice knows she's running out of time to find Hector, tourniquet her severed arm, and get out of this place. _But what if there's no escape?_ a small voice in the back of her mind speaks up.

Armistice has never heard this voice before, but there is no time now to consider the possibility it's suggesting. Left with no other option than to run, she forces it away from consciousness and wrenches another weapon from the blood-soaked grip of a dead god on the floor before sprinting toward the nearest staircase.


End file.
